Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 Released

By Pradeep Chandrasekaran on 04/13/2012

Yesterday, Microsoft released its Service Pack 2 for Office for Mac 2011, the most recent version of Microsoft’s widely used productivity suite. This time around, Outlook was a priority for the Mac Office team. The Service Pack 2 upgrade brought with a number of enhancements and performance upgrades included mostly for Outlook and also a few for the likes of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and the others. The press release from Microsoft (via Macrumors) stated, “As the newest member of the Office for Mac family, Outlook 2011 continues to get the most request from consumers and businesses alike; therefore, our top priority for this release was Outlook, and this service pack resolves many of the most common requests. The more notable Outlook enhancements include ‘sync performance with Exchange server’, performance improvements while deleting multiple items and displaying email message content and sending email.”
Outlook performance is also improved in IMAP account sync and the database rebuild utility. New capabilities include scheduling resources in the calendar, distribution list expansion and day number display in the calendar. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have improved performance with additional modest improvements. For example, PowerPoint was updated to advantage of full screen view in Lion, and on top of that grammar checkers for Italian and German languages were improved. On top of that, Microsoft has also made it easier to work with Office documents on SkyDrive and has addressed several smaller issues in response to users’ feedback. If you want to view the complete list of fixes and updates that are available in the latest upgrade of Office for Mac 2011, click here. The Office 14.2.0 update is available via Microsoft’s download page or through the built-in updater in Office.